Captain Billy's Whiz Bang

Not a comic — the 1919 pocket humor digest of jokes, bawdy verse, and cartoons that built Fawcett Publications, named its first comic (Whiz Comics), and lent its 'Billy' to Captain Marvel. Presented complete and unedited.

25 full issues to read · every one public domain

Before Fawcett Publications printed a single comic book, it printed dirty jokes.

Captain Billy's Whiz Bang was launched in 1919 by Wilford Hamilton "Captain Billy" Fawcett — a decorated World War I veteran — out of Robbinsdale, Minnesota. It was a pocket-sized digest of gags, bawdy verse, barracks humor, and cartoons; its name borrowed the soldiers' slang for an incoming artillery shell (a "whiz-bang"). It was cheap, it was racy for its day, and it was enormously popular — at its peak it sold in the hundreds of thousands, and the profits built a publishing house.

That house became Fawcett Publications. And when Fawcett entered the new comic-book business in 1940, it named its flagship title after the magazine that paid for everything: Whiz Comics. The hero on its cover was Captain Marvel — and the orphaned newsboy who shouted "Shazam!" to become him was named Billy Batson. Within a few years Captain Marvel was outselling Superman.

So the line runs straight from a Minnesota veteran's joke book to the best-selling superhero of the 1940s. We keep the Whiz Bang here, in the exhibition, not the comic reader — it is a humor magazine of prose and verse, not a comic — presented complete and unedited, period voice and all. It is, quite literally, where a comics empire came from.